My father did eat me,
And yet I'm still here,
Kiwitt, kiwitt."
The story is likewise told in the Pfalz with another beginning; the stepmother one day sends the two children into the wood to seek strawberries, and the one who comes home first is to have an apple. Then the little boy ties the little girl to a tree and comes back first, but the mother will not give him anything until he has brought his little sister home. The story is common in Hesse, but is seldom told so circumstantially, the only addition that we derive from thence is that the little sister strings together the bones on a red silken thread. The verse runs,
'My mother she boiled me,
My father he ate me,
My little sister sat under the table,
Picked up all my little bones,
Threw them over the pear-tree
And then a little bird came out
That sings both day and night."
In a Swabian story, otherwise incomplete, Meier, No. 2, we find,
'Chirp, chirp,
What a pretty little bird am I!
My mother she cooked me.
My father he ate me!"
There is a passage in Goethe's Faust, p. 225, which our story will help to explain, and which the poet unquestionably took from ancient oral tradition.
"Meine Mutter die Hur,
die mich umgebracht hat,
mein Vatet der Schelm
der mich gessen hat,
mein Schwesterlein klein
hub auf die Bein
an einem kühlen Ort,
da ward ich schönes Waldvögelein
fliege fort, fliege fort!"
The story is indigenous in the south of France, in Languedoc and Provence, and its details do not differ from the German one. The bird sings,
"ma marâtre,
pique pâtre,
m'a fait bouillir
et rebouillir.
